{"id":4906,"date":"2005-08-05T13:48:37","date_gmt":"2005-08-05T17:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4906.html"},"modified":"2005-08-05T13:48:37","modified_gmt":"2005-08-05T17:48:37","slug":"a-forgetful-supreme-court-nominee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-forgetful-supreme-court-nominee\/","title":{"rendered":"A forgetful Supreme Court nominee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are a variety of compelling concerns about John Roberts&#8217; Supreme Court nomination, but one shortcoming that hasn&#8217;t been explored yet is his apparently poor memory.<\/p>\n<p>It started a couple of weeks ago when we learned that Roberts said <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2005\/07\/24\/AR2005072401201.html\">he had no memory<\/a> of belonging to the Federalist Society, despite serving as a member of the steering committee of the organization&#8217;s Washington chapter in the late 1990s. OK, maybe the group didn&#8217;t leave a lasting impression on him.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, Roberts prepared a 67-page response to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, responding to a variety of inquiries, including &#8220;specific instances&#8221; about his pro bono work, how he had fulfilled those responsibilities, and the amount of time he had devoted to them. Roberts didn&#8217;t mention his work on behalf of gay-rights activists in the Romer case. He apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-na-roberts4aug04,0,1823941.story?coll=la-home-headlines\">didn&#8217;t remember<\/a> the work.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;John probably didn&#8217;t recall [the case] because he didn&#8217;t play as large a role in it as he did in others,&#8221; [Walter Smith, who was in charge of pro bono work at Hogan &#038; Hartson] said Wednesday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Then we learned that Roberts omitted information on the same Senate questionnaire about having been a registered lobbyist in 2001. Why? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-na-cosmetic4aug04,1,7822138.story?coll=la-headlines-nation\">Because he forgot<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee&#8217;s ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Roberts explained that his firm had registered him as a lobbyist because he met with government lawyers as part of his work representing the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Assn. At the time, the association sought to block a proposed labeling regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Roberts explained that because his work for the association consisted of preparation for litigation, &#8220;the question about lobbying on the questionnaire did not trigger a memory of those meetings.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Taken individually, these don&#8217;t seem like critically important omissions. But taken together, it seems Roberts is awfully forgetful, isn&#8217;t he?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are a variety of compelling concerns about John Roberts&#8217; Supreme Court nomination, but one shortcoming that hasn&#8217;t been explored yet is his apparently poor memory. It started a couple of weeks ago when we learned that Roberts said he had no memory of belonging to the Federalist Society, despite serving as a member of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}